Saturday, March 28, 2009

How time flies! It's already Antichrist Saturday. However, I think I'll change the name, since that one is too loaded, and bound to be misunderstood by all but our most fanatical readers. Therefore, we'll use the term anti-Bob to designate the Odious one who wishes to misappropriate our slack and reduce us to serfs of his levy-athon state. Instead of a nation of resourceful and individualistic rascals in charge of our own slack, the anti-Bob would turn us into a grey nation of pathetic sponge Bobs and splenetic bland beasts. Obama is the quintessential Slack Liberation Theologist, as he is all about liberating us from our precious, God-given slack.

But when the slackless have enviously confiscated all of the slack from the productive members of society, there is no slack left for anyone but the super-wealthy. Look at the present situation, in which the anti-Bob is even plundering the slack of future generations (at least the ones who will not be aborted, abortion being the ultimate in slack theft) in order to give a kind of "false slack" to his slack-jawed and open-handed mytho-flockers.

But any serious slackonomist knows that this will fail, as true slack can never be created or conferred in this manner. Our founding subgenii knew that our slack was a divine birthright, and that the state could not grant it, only protect it. The problem inevitably faced by the left is that eventually there is no more slack left to steal. Then, instead of being the beacon of slack for the world, we will be just like any other slackless hive of leftist rabble, climbing over each other like animals to fight over the few crumbs of slack granted by the state.

*****

It was like watching people letting themselves be hypnotized for the greater glory not of Christ but of men. It was like watching a generation willing to continue their enslavement to a self-imposed definition of inferiority rather than rise up in the liberation of truth faith and equality. I saw not a hunger for the glory of God, but a thirsting after the glory of a race to the detriment of all others. How weak, I thought, and how shameful. A Christ triumphant would drive these race hustlers from His temple. --Vanderleun @ American Digest

Yesterday I mentioned that one of the reasons the left gives Obama a pass on his membership in a religious hate cult is the soft bigotry of low or no expectations for blacks. Of course they hate us. Of course they believe crazy things. Of course they seek solace in bizarre conspiracy theories.

However, another big reason is that the left doesn't take religion seriously except for any version of "conservative" Christianity, which it takes as a serious evil. All other religions are simply harmless or neutral, no matter how harmful, Obama's Trinity Church being a quintessential example. Spengler quotes James Cone, one of its most prominent "theologians":

"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community.... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love."

Spengler notes that in his recent defense of Rev. Wright, Obama made reference to the "academic prominence" of Black Liberation Theology -- which, translated, means the indulgence by white leftist intellectuals of this kind of abject kookery. Ironically, Obama's "faith in the white establishment is touching; [Wright] honestly cannot understand why the white reporters at Fox News are bothering him when the University of Chicago and the Union Theological Seminary have put their stamp of approval on black liberation theology."

Of course, white leftists do not put their stamp of approval on Black Liberation Theology because it is theology, but because it is Black, but more to the point, Marxist.

[Brief update: just yesterday I read a passage by Balthasar, who raised a point that I have discussed in the past, that Marxism represents a kind of radically upside-down and debased version of Judaism -- which would explain why, in the history of leftism, disaffected and sometimes frankly anti-semitic Jews have always played such a prominent role (think of Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Howard Zinn, Michael Lerner, etc.). It's just a brief footnote, but he reminds us of how any "liberation theology" is rooted in a utopian messianism, in which the object of hope is fully immamentized. In true theology, the messiah is outside space and time, even while drawing us toward him.

But the false messianism of the left takes the Jewish idea of the messiah, and politicizes it. This creates a "radical eschatology," in which it is believed that our existential alienation can be remedied by overturning the present order. This is why the left is always so reactionary, since they inevitably convert perennial existential / ontological / spiritual problems into political ones. In turn, they will always be attracted to false messiahs and anti-Bobs, whereas the spiritually normal person will be immune to the attraction. There are no political solutions to spiritual problems, whereas there is usually a spiritual solution to most politicized problems.]

All valid theology has to do with systematic distinctions between ego and Self on the one hand, and reality and illusion on the other. Ego is to illusion as Self is to reality. Human beings are uniquely and providentially situated in the cosmos so as to be naturally (horizontally) idolatrous but supernaturally (vertically) -- or "transnaturally" -- oriented to the Absolute. This is just another way of saying that human beings are mirrors of the Absolute, and potentially contain within themselves the entire scale of being, the whole existentialada.

For example, Schuon notes that the great Christian virtues, e.g., charity, humility, poverty, and childlikeness, have their final end in the transcendent Self, or in Christian terms, the nous. Each of these virtues represents a negation "of that ontological inflation which is the ego." Practice of them helps soften and dissolve this existential infarct that clogs up the arteries of being. Likewise, Christ represents "the Self holding out a hand to 'me'; man must lose his life, the life of the ego, in order to keep it, the life of the Self."

Black Liberation Theology precisely turns the cosmos upside down in the manner of all materialists -- which is another reason why it is embraced by left wing materialists. For it promises not any kind of universal transcendence of the ego, but a particular fulfillment of its demands for a "chosen" (in the pernicious, non-Judaic sense) people: "Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community." Here the "black community" is analogous to the rebellious ego, which makes its own intrinsically heretical demands upon God: "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

Shelby Steele writes of Obama that "a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity," and that his tacit endorsement of "a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism" represents "a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness." Again, the source and outcome of this need are ego insecurity and "hardening," not spiritual aspiration and transcendence.

In genuine theology it is understood that "the world" -- and by extension, your very life -- are "on fire," so to speak. This is how many of Jesus' most extreme statements are to be taken -- as urgent calls to get a clue about the eternal order of existence, and to do something about it before it is too late. I would say "obviously," but I guess it's not, that Jesus was not referring to the political order of the world. Rather, he was speaking to Man as such about Existence as such -- not to this or that man in this or that situation, but about the way things always are for man as he always is.

But as Vanderleunnotes in his essay, it's easy to confuse the manacles we forge for ourselves with the ones we imagine are placed upon us by others, and then rail against the others as a substitute for the universal call to self-betterment and transcendence. For as Schuon writes, "the man who does not know that existence is an immense brazier has no imperative reason for wanting to get out of it" -- which is why the beginning of wisdom is the awe of God, not the hatred of white people, or Rush Limbaugh, or "neo-cons," the latter attitude only plunging those who embrace it deeper into the flames.

I thought, watching these sermons, these crazed rants spouted in the name of God, "Don't they know.... Can't they see... They're not worshipping God or Christ, they are worshipping men.... racist men.... the very thing their forefathers suffered under and fought to get free of... and now they're back in the same place. --American Digest

Friday, March 27, 2009

I remember my first time. It's not the kind of thing one forgets. Suddenly I knew in my bones that

"The intimate character of being, which reaches its completed end in the conscious spirit, has its preliminary stages in unconscious nature. There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be."

Bear in mind that I am not talking about the first few fumbling attempts to pierce the veil of reality after getting hopped up on reefer pills with my buddies in the back of Lumpy's van.

Rather, this actually occurred in a state of sobriety while walking the dog on a warm summer evening. I was idly contemplating something Whitehead had said along similar lines, when the Gagdad coconut "snapped" in such a way that the inside was now out, and the outside in. I suppose you could say that it was like the sudden solution to a koan, which is not an intellectual affair, but more of a breakthrough into the ground of being.

In turn, once you have secured that realization, then so many other pieces of the puzzle naturally fall into place. In other words, once one understands that interiority is not somehow magically confined to animal brains in such a way that it defies all explanation, then the most intractable problems of philosophy more or less vanish. We see that these "problems" were just the inevitable residue of our defective mode of knowing.

Just a brief soph-reverential note about the circularity of the Coonifesto. When you first read chapter one, you may get an intellectual "feel" for this cosmic interiority. But after having broken through into cosmobliteration on p. 266 and returning to the ground on p. 6, the next journey through chapter one should be rather different, in that you are now equipped to "realize" what you could only "know" the first time around. I don't want to give away all of the jokes, but this is what we were driving at on page 264, where it is written,

O me ga! I can explain everything. I know this place. Been here before. Where we started. No it this time. A huge mythunderstanding. The word made fresh. Non-friction. Telos when its over. Now. It is accomplished. End of the piper trail. You're on your own.

This passage has more baggage than I can unpack at the moment, but "O me ga!" is the shocking realization of the end (omega), the telos, which tells us all about the beginning. Thus, we can "explain everything," but only in the eternal now, where there is no longer a radical disjunction between the "it" and the "I," or subject and object (no "it"). It's the same place, but now we know it in an entirely different, participatory manner.

However, this is not something any mortal can give to you, like a piece of information. You cannot follow me like a pied piper. Rather, you're "on your own" (O-->n). Well, not really. "It is accomplished" by the One who has already rejoined heaven and earth, inside and outside, man and God. And he's always happy to extend a little nonlocal assistance to get it accompliced.

With regard to scientific law, one could never say "it is accomplished," since the laws apply only to a finite realm that has already been unnaturally split into rigid categories of subject and object.

Thus, at their margins, both science in general and the scientific method in particular generate metaphysical absurdities that can never be resolved within the realm of science, since it assumes up front what it tries to eliminate at the back. This is strictly impossible, but don't tell the tenured. It would be cruel to deprive a primitive people of their comforting myths.

Suffice it to say that Sophia never makes passes at scientistic asses, despite the latter's "never-ending attempt to woo the core of the material world" (and remember, matter is related to mater and maya, or the primordial feminine). While the physicist no doubt "thinks" he understands the charming ways of mamamaya, so long as he is stuck in his fully masculine mode of thinking, he won't get to first base.

Rather, as Balthasar notes, the scientist's "perplexity about the ultimate essence of matter" is a permanent fact, whereas "living being, to whose realm we ourselves belong" may "in the end [be] better known to us than inanimate nature."

This should by no means come as a surprise to senior Raccoons, who know that metaphysics is the only truly "exact science," whereas everything else is more or less opinion. And one of these metaphysical laws is that the realm of matter, "not merely by reason of some accidental circumstance, but by reason of intrinsic necessity, must always remain richer than any cognition of it and that the truth of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time..." This is the nature of Sophia: veils upon veils upon veils.

The interiority of the cosmos is an irreducible fact (or principle), but it obviously becomes more concentrated and expansive as we move up the vertical, and therefore gain greater access to the Mystery of it All:

"Even on the lowest level of life, the living entity already irradiates such plenitude and power from the hidden core of its interiority that we should fall back, blinded, before every one of its outward forms." Any scientific inquiry that clams to explain the Mystery of Life is "simply absurd." It "touches the the sacred core of life with profane fingers" and "covers the unknown with names and concepts but does not see that it has only glued a mere label onto a container of unknown content."

I discussed this problem in my book -- how science begins with the real world, constructs abstractions from that world, and then proceeds to confuse the abstraction for the reality, so that anything falling outside the abstraction is no longer real! It is definitely a kind of madness.

We can see this madness in the global warming hysterics, for whom a speculative weather report 100 years into the future is more real than the living people who are freezing their asses off today. And we obviously see the same thing in the metaphysical Darwinists, for whom theories of life are more real than Life Itself. (And as Dennis Prager mentioned yesterday, this is also the perennial pathology of leftist thought, which habitually regards its theories as more real than the reality they are supposed to describe.)

What is the Mystery of Being? It has to do with the fact that Being is "permanently concealed," and yet, "permanently divulged," like an "intimate-public secret." And as Balthasar emphasizes, in a certain very real way, we know more about this "secret" if we accept its testimony "as it is," rather than trying to peel away the endless layers in a futile effort to find its "essence." One will never find the essence of so much as a single tree by that route. Rather, the essence of the tree may be in its majesty, its dignity, its beauty, its strength, its generosity. As such, "no one who has witnessed the unfolding of a plant's life ought to say that he has seen 'only' the appearance of life, not its essence."

Again, the essence is the appearance, only not in any exhaustive way. Rather, the essence is a kind of plenitude that displays itself in the endless play of appearances. We know by looking at the manifestation "that the possibilities of life are infinitely more abundant than what is actually on display." This only becomes more apparent as we move up into the higher realms. For example, this blog and my essence are "not two," even while not being identical. I do my best to reveal my essence, and yet, there is no end to it.

And being that we are in the image of the Creator, I think that pretty much sums up one aspect of his creative activity. Just as his transcendence is necessarily immanent, his immanence is necessarily transcendent. Thus, his inside is everywhere outside (and vice versa), which is one more reason that the outside is so permeated with infinitude. Manifestation is a kind of gift of the inexhaustible divine essence, but only if we open his presence.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Truth as Freedom. For those of you scoring at home, that's the title of the next chapter of the Theo-Logic, and it will do perfectly as a title of this post, the substance of which we are about to freely discover. I hope.

Who could argue with the following proposition: "The actualization of truth is no mere natural process but a spiritual event, which takes place only in the lightning-like encounter and fusion of two words -- the word of the subject and the word of the object. Outside of this event, there is truth."

Thus, if you do not understand that truth is a supernatural thang, then buddy, you've got some catchin' up to do. Nature may embody truth, but it takes a supernatural act to pull a truthy rabbit out of a material hat, to quote Aquinas on one of his rare "off days." No: "The truth of the object exists only so long as infinite or finite spirit turns to it in an act of knowing; the truth of the subject exists only as long as it abides in this act" (Balthasar).

So truth is implicated in both subject and object, but only their mutual encounter "activates" the truth between them, sort of like the erotic spark between male and female. I know you know I know you know what I mean, because the love of truth cannot be separated from its own distinct version of eros, which the psychoanalsyt Christopher Bollas has called the "eros of form."

This is a particular kind of encounter with objects that releases the truth of the self into being. This is why we all respond to different objects -- and subjects! -- which have a way of giving birth to a latent part of ourselves. If you think about it, this has mulch in common with the fertile Platonic idea of education, the purpose of which is more to draw out what is within than to stuff other people's notions of sexy ideas into us. Some people are turned on by the strangest things!

Was that clear? For example, in my case, I rarely encountered any kind of personally engaging pneuma-cognitive spiritual form throughout all of my schooling, at least until my last two years of college, when something fortuitously began to ring a bell, and then my voice started to change. You could say that this was the dawn of my intellectual clueberty, which is also when I began to have terrible crushes on various ideas and thinkers -- including many leftist soul-crushing thinkers such as Chomsky, Zinn, The Nation, and all the rest of that promiscuous crowd. It's a wonder I didn't die of one of their spinereal diseases!

But of course, it was only puppy love. As is usually the case, I was merely "in love with love," that is, the thrill of encountering illicit ideas that the mass of Americans knew nothing about. For example, our empty ravin' kosbags have nothing on me. I knew that America was a torture state way back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president. I knew full well that we were no better than the USSR, and that by opposing communism, we merely reduced ourselves to their mirror image, just as we do today with the Islamic supremacists. Furthermore, we had just as many "political prisoners" as the Soviet Union, but we just called them "blacks."

In the spirit of fool disclosure, I must also admit that I actually attended a Noam Chomsky lecture some 20 years ago. I remember it well, because he assured the lunatic crowd that George Bush was poised to invade Cuba and oust our beloved comrade Fidel! In fact, I'm guessing that the only reason we didn't do so is because Chomsky blew the whistle on those fascists.

Enough about me and my sordid infidelities. But another reason why I do not argue with leftists is that I have only to mentally travel back to that hellseein' daze, and imagine how I would have reacted if a so-called conservative had presumed to instruct me about anything. I was 100% unreceptive, and would use the occasion merely to enlist them into my persecutory fantasy world. Because I was just as intelligent then as I am today -- maybe even more so, given the inevitable loss of brain cells -- I was virtually always able to run circles around my interlocutor and prove my demonic superiority.

Shame on me. There is no end to the damage to truth caused by the abuse of intelligence. I am not one of those people who is impressed by Obama's intelligence. Indeed, for those of us who have been there, it is a sorry sight to watch this cognitively arrested boob in action. This is not just an insult, because it is quite obvious that Obama is not free to discover truth, since he is laboring under the oppressive weight of systematic falsehoods he has passively absorbed throughout his friction-free life. Being good at articulating lies in charcoal activated cigaret-burnished tones should not be confused with being "articulate."

One cannot get to the freedom of truth unless one first appreciates the "unfreedom." The spirit must first apprentice itself to the object world before it can "attain to itself." This is very similar to the manner in which one must first master scales and chords before one is truly free to play a musical instrument. In fact, for a true master, the unfreedom and freedom will live side by side for the remainder of one's life. John Coltrane used to practice eight hours a day long after he was considered the greatest living master of the tenor sax.

Things are more than things, and facts are more than facts. If that weren't the case, then we would all be identical, in the way that animals and the tenured are. If you've seen one radical squirrel you've seen them all, because they are all operating from the same facts, like "Fox bad, ACORN good."

But for human beings, facts are always enshrouded in mystery, for they are an occasion to know the great Mystery of Withinness. Facts speak to humans, again, in ways that engage us in particularly intimate ways. Take the simple example of this book we're talking about here. Not a single person in the world would have highlighted the same passages that I have. So are the facts in the book? Or in me? Or in the space in between?

Actually, when I highlight a passage, it is never because it is merely some "fact" of which I was unaware. Rather, I have a system that allows me to go back to a book and revisit passages that gave me that erotic charge.

As I have mentioned before, this was actually the basis of my book. I keep meaning to digitalize the photos, so I can show them to you, but the first thing I did was remove all of the books from my shelves that spoke truth to me in this intimate way, irrespective of discipline -- physics, biology, anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, historigraphy, psychoanalysis, theology, mysticism, etc. I placed them all on the floor, and stared at them until they reveled to me their hidden unity.

Obviously, no other person ever has or ever will do this in the way I did, but that doesn't mean that the exercise was (merely) eccentric or idiosyncratic. Obviously no single person can know "all truths," but we do the best we can with the materials available to us. The point, I believe, is to try to inflect the universal through the lens of the particular, which is what really makes truth come alive -- alive in us! Anything less than this living process tends toward pedantry and tenure.

Theological mind jazz, daddy-o. That's what it is. If it weren't for the wonderful erotic mystery that enshrouds truth, we'd all be singing from the same boring hymnal. "The event of knowledge would cast a cold, pitiful, shadowless light into every corner, and there would be no possibility of escaping this scorching sun. Being, stripped of mystery, would be, so to speak, prostituted" (Balthasar).

And if one more troll equates what I do with relativism or deconstruction... This is the precise opposite of those cynical and spiritually barren approaches. Rather, that sort of "radical cynicism only becomes possible wherever man no longer has a flair for the central mystery of being, whenever he has unlearned reverence, wonder, and adoration, whenever, having denied God, whose essence is always characterized by the wonderful, man also overlooks the wondrousness of every single created entity."

There is a perverse joy in this radical cynicism, and I again remember it well. Nor is it difficult to trace its roots, now that I have a four year old boy who likes to build things, but not nearly as much as he enjoys tearing them apart, knocking them down, or disassembling them to see "what's inside." But of course, there is no inside without the outside. The outside is the manifestation of the inside, just as the inside is the invisible "essence" of the outside. Jettison either, and the cosmos is reduced to a flat and empty place.

The outside reveals the inside, just as the downside reveals the upside.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The creative side of human knowledge is therefore the creature's analogical participation in the act by which God's archetypal, productive knowledge creatively metes out truth. By a kind of grace, knowledge draws the other into the properly spiritual sphere, thus giving it the opportunity to unfold therein by the power, and the light, of the subject -- before it has to become, in its objectivity, the object of knowledge. --Balthasar

Allow me to explain. While knowledge begins in perception, it does not end there. Rather, "sensory intuition can do no more than introduce the image into the space of the subject" (Balthasar). But then what? How is it that human beings are able to escape the immediacy of perception and rise above it into the realm we call knowledge? -- which, if it is not objective, is no knowledge at all, just opinion at best (and often anti-knowledge or -K).

Furthermore, it is one thing to accomplish this "distancing" with material objects, much more tricky to do so with one's own mind. In other words, for all of us, our consciousness is simply "given" to us, as in any animal.

But man -- potentially anyway -- possesses a "double consciousness" that allows him to distance himself from the objects of his own mind and to analyze and judge them. In short, man is able to attain to objectivity toward himself and the world, which is synonymous with truth.

Which, when you think about it, is a little odd, because it means that, in becoming objective, the subject is back to being a kind of object, as it were. This is confusing, because your typical village atheist or bonehead materialist would claim that he is the one who is being "objective," whereas the Raccoon position maintains precisely the opposite: that the materialist is lost in his ethereal, subjective, and manmode abstractions, whereas only the Man of Spirit dwells in the Real.

Now, the question is, who is right -- besides me, that is?

This reminds me very much of psychoanalytic therapy, which does not just consist of two objects hashing things out for an outrageous fee. Rather, first of all, you must imagine a "bi-personal field" that is co-created by analyst and patient. Everything that occurs in therapy will actually take place in this field, not in one or the other of its constituents per se.

In my mind, I picture a couple of children at play. One of them (the patient) comes in and dumps his bag of toys on the floor. The two of us proceed to play with them. Why this toy? Why not that toy? Hmm, you seem overly attached to this one here. And why is that one always turned upside down so no one can see it? Any ideas why? And why can't I touch that one over there? Why are you hiding it? And why do you keep playing the same game over and over, even though you never win? Or always win in a predictable game that is too easy? And you seem to think I want to steal your toys, even while you are envious of the wonderful toys you imagine I have stashed away somewhere. Etc.

I remember one patient whose transference to me was so intense, that it was impossible to conduct therapy. She essentially "fell in love" in the first session, not in a therapeutic way, but in the usual way. There was no "space" in which to interpret her feelings, because they would simply be met with words to the effect of, "no, you don't understand. I am in love with you. You are perfect." So in this case, what she called "love" was actually a defense mechanism against knowledge. Many women with histories of abuse do this, i.e., disable their objectivity with a kind of intoxicated auto-hypnosis that feels like love, but is in reality surrender to a powerful predator. If I were the predator type, I would have no problem getting dates with this type of woman.

Back on track. Now, there is obviously a world of difference between objectivity toward matter (or the physical world) vs. objectivity toward Mind or Spirit, and if we fail to appreciate the differences, much mischief will ensue. For in reality, science is irreducibly subjective, whereas only religious metaphysics discloses the objectively real, i.e., a realm of perennial truths that simply cannot not be -- for example, the idea that truth exists and is anterior to man. If this is not true, then there is no truth, period.

As usual, Schuon had many useful things to say about this subject. And when I say "useful," I am being coy, for what I actually mean is "true beyond the shadow of a doubt." For unlike the typical pagan logician, he is employing what might be called transcendent logic, or "the logic of logic."

For example, "By 'objectivity' must be understood not a knowledge that is limited to a purely empirical recording of data received from outside, but a perfect adequation of the knowing subject to the known object.... An intelligence or a knowledge is 'objective' when it is capable of grasping the object as it is and not as it may be deformed by the subject."

Even more, we could say that objectivity implies a more general “conformity to the nature of things,” which surely includes the "inner space" of the subject, on pain of eliminating the one place in the cosmos where Truth may be known and loved. For this is none other than "the contemplative withdrawal into the 'heart,' given that 'the kingdom of God is within you.'"

So we should not confuse subjectivity with any kind of sentimental or romantic "perception-is-reality" nonsense. Rather, it is again the expanding space where reality -- which can only mean "truth" -- may be known and loved for its own sake, not for ours. And of course, we must be willing to "die for love," or it's not much of a love, is it? Schuon:

"Objectivity is a kind of death of the subject in the face of the reality of the object." However, "the subjective compensation of this extinction is the nobleness of character," among other things, i.e., serenity, centeredness, radiance, the "peace that passeth understanding," etc.

Not only that, but in the final Oquation, "the transcendent Object is at the same time the immanent Subject, which is affirmed in the knowing subject, to the extent that the latter is capable of objectivity. Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and the object coincide, and in which the essential takes precedence over the accidental -- or in which the Principle takes precedence over its manifestation -- either by extinguishing it, or by reintegrating it, according to the diverse ontological aspects of relativity itself."

Here again, I think this goes to the very heart of a trinitarian view of things. For this is not to say that in knowledge of God I am identical to God. Again, we are talking about a "non-dual trinitarianism," in which -- in some sense -- we might say that "I and the the Trinity are not-two."

Therefore, to trancelight what Schuon just said, God is a kind of Subject that is purely objective; or, an Object who is transcendently subjective. In God there is no "potential," for he always Is Who He Is. And yet, he eternally generates what he is not (so to speak), which would of course include us. As such, the knower who knows is made of the most precious substance in all of creation, a spiritual substance that is a spark of truth itself -- not the central fire, but then again, not radically separate from it, either.

Thus, looked at one way, we are obviously "not God." But to the extent that God became man (and not just a man, but Man as such), then we may share in God's objectivity and Truth, and therefore, eternity. Again, the “Kingdom of God” is “within you,” but this hardly means it is "subjective," even though it requires a subject to get in -- the subject being "inwardness as such." No subject, no "in." But what we want to enter is the Transcendent Object. As Balthasar explains, "The object's immanence in the subject's consciousness is the prior condition for understanding its transcendence."

Is any of this making sense, or am I just rambling to a polite but uncomprehending choir?

Without the subject, there can be no unity in the cosmos, most particularly, the unity of subjects and objects. Only the subject can heal the ontological wound of subjectivity, not by immolating itself in the world of physical objects, but by its higher flight to their very source. This is not an escape but a spiraling inscape where unity flows into multiplicity and back again.

And this is why perfect objectivity would also have to be perfect nonsense of the type spewed by any great mystic, because only this type of nonsense is "adequate" to an object that always transcends what we can say about it. You could say that human speech will pour off the Logos like water off a duck's back, but that's okay, for if words could actually contain the Divine, then I would be God, and this would be a very boring cosmos. You know how it is -- "Words crack and sometimes break under the burden" (Eliot). But in so doing, we understand that there is a Mighty Big Object against which our words are shattering into pieces -- as in the case of this shattered piece I just wrote.

Really, it's quite a thrill and a privilege to be constantly repulsed by God. It very much reminds me of my son, who, when he greets me, takes a running start and tries his best to crash into me. In turn, I will use his momentum to lift him up in a kind of spiral around my vertical axis.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

All right then, little lambs, the stage is set for us to engage in the ancient Drama of Knowledge. We have a subject. We have objects. And we have a transitional space in between for them to establish their various links: (L), (H), (K), (-K), etc. But nothing has happened yet: "It is not until the other enters into the space of the subject that, like Sleeping Beauty, it [the subject] awakens from its slumber -- at once to the world and to itself" (Balthasar).

In the Wholly Coonifesto, I was interested in identifying the precise moment when the curtain opened on this play of knowledge, which simultaneously ushers subjects and objects onto the stage.

Ever since that moment, the two have been quarreling over top billing, but one could no more have a subject without an object than form without substance or inside without outside. True, the wise men & guys of the east talk about a type of consciousness-without-object, but they do always come back on stage to talk about it, proving that it is more a trick of the senses than any permanently inhabitable state.

The plain fact of the matter is that if everyone lived in a world without consciousness of objects, mankind would soon enough become extinct, which would solve the problem once and for all. Frankly, the world would be better off if all self-proclaimed gurus just got real jobs and manifested their so-called enlightenment in slightly more challenging circumstances than lecturing groups of starry-eyed and adoring dupes.

That's the easy way out. A while back, one of those genial new-agers wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, about this very topic. I didn't read the book, but I did thumb through it at the bookstore several years ago, so I believe I am entitled to a possibly mistaken impression, but I think that the essence of the problem is that he had great difficulty reconciling subject and object -- i.e., "enlightenment" and reality -- after coming down from his lengthy solitary ecstasies.

Let's put it this way, and then move on: there are ascending spiritualities, and there are descending spiritualities. Raccoons are emphatically in the latter camp (or, to be precise, we harmonize the arrows of (↓) (↑) within our being). For example, we do not wish to escape from the body, but to divinize it. Even more than that, we feel we are here to divinize the very cosmos, and then hand it back to the Creator, which is none other than cosmotheosis. God pours himself out in the kenosis of creation. It's the least we can do to return it to him unharmed. Rememeber the Kit Scout rule: always leave the cosmos more sacred than you found it.

I'm confusing volumes here. We'll get more into this subject when we move on to volume 2, but the point is again that objects are real, for the very reason that God eternally creates his own "Other," i.e., the Logos, or second person of the Trinity, so wherever there is one there are actually three (and vice verse; where there are the Three there is the One).

In turn, this is why human beings can never find their true unity in either the object world (which science attempts to do) or in the subject world (as ascending spiritualities and idealist philosophies attempt to do). Such an approach does not heal this cleft in existence, but merely exaggerates it by imagining that the other half has gone away. But it always returns, often with a vengeance.

Christ, however, is the very archetype of the simultaneous healing and preservation of this cleft, the very cleft that makes existence possible. In Christ, God and man are "united without division and without confusion." The incarnate Logos is "the unifier of all that is divided, whether by nature or by sin." He "equally indwells -- and transcends -- both poles of creaturely unity" (i.e., existence and essence).

And as we are sons "through adoption," we too are called upon to repeat this feat, only from our side of the maninfestation, to carry out the unification of the cosmos in ourselves, to rejoin heaven and earth, to reconcile spirit and matter, and "and to present the world thus unified to God." When you do that, then you can say with Christ that it is accomplished, the difference being that we must accomplish it continuously until checkout time.

Only in this way is the Great Circle unbroken: "the creature's procession from God" is balanced by his return, but with brother ass in tow, for "the indestructibility of the body"-- the resurrection of the flesh -- "is the end of the works of God."

Put it this way: there is no better temple to encounter God than in the human form. You will not find superior lodging elsewhere in the cosmos. Is this not again the point of God becoming man, rather than a temple, a book, or a mountain? For one thing, only man can consciously evolve toward his source, and have "unKnown knowledge" (i.e., faith) of the end toward which he tends: his being is in his becoming, like a melody that cannot be reduced to its notes.

Sidetracked! As I was saying, in the Coonifesto, I attempted to pinpoint that glorious moment when the cosmos as we know it actually came into being some 35 to 40,000 years ago, with the "big bang" of humanness. However, it also occurs on a micro, individual basis each time a baby awakens to the world he co-creates in his own transitional space.

We can say that there were two necessary stages for the cosmos to come into being, first Life, then Mind. With regard to the former, the book talks about that "luminous fissure that was about to break open in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle. Here, the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world." This represented an ontological rupture in the cosmos, with only two ways to heal it: up or down, that is back to matter or up into the mind and eventually spirit capable of encompassing the whole.

Regarding the healing of this ontological rupture, this is the secret meaning of Toots' cryptic mantra, in God we truss.

But this takes time. In fact, you might say that time is the time it takes for time to return to eternity. For as Balthasar explains, "The subject's subjectivity is not a finished product" that "merely awaits the arrival of the object to come into appearance." Rather, "the subject comes to itself only through the construction and completion of the world that [goes] on inside it." Without the world of objects, we remain "an unformed ego" with "no form, no contours, no definite lineaments, no character. It becomes formed in the measure that it takes the world in and helps it take place."

This is why we say that the Way of the Raccoon is only for mature adults who have already become Masters of Their Domain. Unlike, say, Ken Wilber, we will never start a children's crusade of empty-headed 20-somethings to try to trigger the Revolution. Rather, we would advise such saps and saplings to stop running away from life and to get a real job, maintain a healthy marriage, be a good parent, etc. Bring Spirit down into that world, rather than escaping it into new age fantasies that elevate you above the people who actually make your comfy world possible.

"Thus, it is only by toiling away at sifting and analysis, division and composition, that the subject gradually regains its freedom. It begins totally expropriated by the world, and only by performing the work of the subject does it get its recompense for its labor, which is its character as a well-rounded, formed and masterful self." In so doing, the subject becomes increasingly "cosmoform" (Balthasar), and fit for handing back to the God who did all the heavy lifting anyway.

Monday, March 23, 2009

We're still dwelling in the space between subjects and objects, without which truth would be in-conceivable, since this transitional space is the womb where the truth of spirit and spirit of truth are nurtured and given birth herebelow in the fertile egghead. (New reader(s) will have to go back to Friday's post in order to see where we left off, specifically, the part about trees and the qualities without which they are not trees -- qualities that can only reveal themselves in a human subject.)

It is not as if the world consists simply of objects that impress themselves upon subjects, like a seal in hot wax. That is too "bipolar" and ultimately static, and places too much emphasis on the object side of things. For if this were the case, then the subject would reduce to the object, even while providing no reason why this mirrorculous subject should inhere in here at all.

Not only that, but as we have mentioned before, the fact that the object has qualities waiting to be "unpacked" by subjects means that there is already an implicit subject in the object. Objects "speak" their qualities to subjects, but not all at once. Rather, it is literally a kind of endlessly recursive con-versation ("flowing-togther"), for in the final analysis we cannot fully know the essence of so much as a gnat.

Truly, we cannot "contain" a single object -- again, thank God! For if we could, the mystery of being would be nullified, and we would live in a brightly lit hell, which is the end result of the naive demystification of scientism.

"In reality, the objects of this world need the subject's space in order to be themselves" (Balthasar). It reminds me of how it is only human convention that separates the bee and the flower, when they are so interior to each other that the one could not exist in the absence of the other. Each is an "external organ" of the other, so to speak.

As Balthasar explains, the object "needs the sensorium as a space in which to unfurl itself. It unveils its color within an eye that sees color; it whispers only in an ear that hears sound; it presents its unique flavor only in the mouth of another capable of tasting. It makes use of the space furnished for this purpose just as surely as it makes use of the soil and the ambient air in order to develop." "[S]ubject and object expand within each other, thus helping each other in a common discovery of truth."

Wind that speaks to the leaves / telling stories that no one believes / Stories of love / belong to you and me --Antonio Carlos Jobim, Dindi

Just so, human beings are irreducibly intersubjective. Take away the Other -- and the love in between -- and no I comes into being. As we will later discuss, this goes to the very heart of the eternal dynamism of the Trinity, as it manifests its image or echo in the herebelow.

There are many fruitful ways to think about this, but I-magine the intra-trinitarian life as a kind of perpetual giving birth to its own Other (the Son), who is actually none other than itself. The Father bears witness to the Son and the Son bears witness to the Father in the love that flows between them -- which is also why love is prior to knowledge. There is no is that can be reduced to anything less, i.e., to any kind of static, loveless monism or narcissistic dualism. In other words, we are intrinsically trinitarian because God is. (I probably just said something heretical, but don't worry, I'm sure I can fix it later.)

Or again, think of a smiling face, which we can only artificially separate from the joyful interior state it radiates to the world: "A smiling face is not simply a dull reflection of inner joy but rather its embodiment, its communication, its formation, its liberation."

I will never forget the first time my baby smiled at me, for it was a communication of a kind of infinite joy that crashed through to my deepest essence. So, was it about him, or about me? As I have said before, we raise our children, but not nearly as high as they raise us! Only now do I realize that my parents got a much bigger kick out of me than I ever will. People who cannot get over themselves, or who are joylessly ambitious, are in a way forever trying to look at themselves through the eyes of their adoring parents, instead of looking outward and adoring something or someone else.

In this regard, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the damage done to the soul by the assimilation of crude materialism, for it is ultimately the very death of the soul. The soul is "all it knows," and in materialism, the soul not only knows nothing (by definition) but is violently uprooted from the creation.

Don't let this happen to you! Our recent trolls stand as living witnesses to what happens to a person who is biologically alive while remaining spiritually dead. Intrinsic falsehood, intrinsic amorality, intrinsic ugliness, and intrinsic violence -- a kind or rooted rootlessness, which also results in their absence of coherence or consistency. Zombies.

From a God's-eye view, mankind is more like a single entity in both space and time -- like a single "substance" that is stretched through history to serially reveal its inexhaustible essence in the play of forms. This is how, for example, we are able to be "one" with great souls who preceded us, because there is a non-local interconnectivity within this temporal substance, just as there is within space. Someday this will be obvious to more people, instead of only being so at the leading edge of that stretchy cosmic substance.

Again, think of truth as a "joint operation of subject and object," not a property inhering only in one or the other. There is no "discovery" that isn't simultaneously an "unveiling of the object" in the space between them. A human being who is not ushered into this transitional space is not really human at all; again, he will be either a kind of autistic "object," or else a new-age narcissist who imagines he creates reality -- or that reality is a kind of magical projection of the subject. Both are states of human non-being.

In truth -- again, as in the Trinity -- there is a kind of mutual surrender, or self-giving, between object and subject, which is why knowledge touches on the sacred. Not for nothing does Genesis talk about Adam "knowing" Eve, thus emphasizing the intimacy and love that are prior to knowledge. For is it possible to know existence without first loving it? Yes, I suppose so, if you reduce knowledge and sexuality to the friction between a couple of objects.

Here is the passionate witness of a true lover of his mamamaya: Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn.... you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God (Teilhard de Chardin).

You see? It is possible to lose the soul in its objects or to be "saved" by them, depending upon one's attitude toward this oneish world of holy matterimany, toward this manifestivus for the rest of us. For "God's idea is indivisible, even though it needs both the knowable object and the knowing subject in order to reveal itself in its unity" (Balthasar).

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Reader Brian asks, "You've alluded to this before -- and may have dealt with it in the comments when I wasn't looking -- but I am incredibly interested in your take on Saul of Tarsus becoming Paul. His mindset was quite hostile to Christ, yet he had an almost involuntary conversion. Or was it involuntary? So many who wish to serve their Creator fall short because of internal divisions, etc., but Saul absolutely wanted the opposite, yet he became the man who spread the Gospel more effectively than anybody. Did God reach out to him, or did he reach out to God, or is there even a difference?"

As a matter of fact, I was thinking about this subject just yesterday. For in a certain way, the story of Saul-->Paul is as central to the Bible -- and to the arc of salvation -- as several other scriptural "centers," or "axes," each of which seems to parallel or reflect back and forth upin the others. For example, one obvious center is in Genesis 1:1, with the creation (a Raccoon would say "origin") of the cosmos.

This cosmo-scriptural center is deliberately paralleled in John 1:1, which even begins with the same three words, In The Beginning. In both instances, "beginning" superficially refers to the "horizontal" beginning, as in the beginning of a sequence. But the deeper sense of the word has to do with the "vertical" beginning, which equates to the ontological center.

This center is not in space or time per se; rather, space and time are reflections of the center. "In the beginning was the Word" does not (just) mean "a long time ago," but in the center represented by each now -- the now being the horizontal center of time. This center is the "light that shines in the darkness," since light is precisely that which radiates through the now from the center to the periphery.

Now, a man was sent by God -- i.e., the center -- "to bear witness of the Light" -- i.e., the radiation from the divine center. His name was John. He was required because, although the light shines in the dark, the dorks don't get it, so they need a pretty in-your-face kind of guy to grab them by the tunic and point it out to them. John was just that man. As such, he represents another important center, a sort of "reflected center" who was not the light but who could see the light.

Jesus obviously represents the full embodiment of the center at the periphery. A couple of days ago we spoke of black holes, and how they pull everything into their vortex, so that nothing escapes. In a certain sense, Jesus might be thought of as the opposite, as a sort of "white hole" as it were, that pulls all of creation into its wake. You have heard of the esoteric tenet, "as above, so below," or, to be precise, "That which is below corresponds to that which is above, and that which is above corresponds to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing."

Another fundamental axiom is the greater the cause, the greater the effect. Thus, if Jesus is who he says he was, then it should be no surprise whatsoever that his effect continues to ripple through existence down through the centuries, like a depth charge dropped from heaven into the ocean of existence. It is not "speaking poetically" to say that we are surfing one of those little waves right now, no? If not, what are we doing? Just sitting here making stuff up at 5:00 in the morning? Er, I don't think so. If that were the case, you wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. It would be perfect nonsense instead of perfect nonsense.

The Mystery of Golgotha represents an exact analogue of the mystery of creation itself. For if creation is God's kenosis, or self-emptying (and spontaneous and unnarcissary self-giving), then Jesus' work on the cross represents a parallel kenosis, a complete self-emptying, even into the "negative existence" of death.

For Jesus does not merely "die," but takes on the mantle of Death in order to join ranks with the great "brotherhood of the dead." As Balthasar has written, when it is said that Jesus descended into hell on Holy Saturday, "descend" (in his opinion; others may disagree) should not be understood in its active sense, but the strictly passive sense. He fell and fell and fell, just like humans, to the very periphery of existence, the furthest point from the light of the radiant cosmic center. Only once he hit bottom could the "fall" be reversed, the rock bottom nihil of dark death being the "relatively absolute" separation from God.

Now this is all well and good for God, Sons of God, Light, Logoi, hand-selected apostles, and the like. Where do we fit in -- regular guys and gals, ordinary stumblebums, rank and foul earthlings?

Here I think that Saul serves as an archetypal illustration of the divine center as it manifests in fallen man. For just as Jesus represents the center crashing into the periphery, Saul ultimately represents the perpiphery making its way back to the center.

In fact, Saul is not just an ordinary peripheral man who is ignorant of the Light, i.e. luciferian. Rather, he is like the ACLU or the MSM or the Democrat party. He is specifically at war with the light. He is "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord," perhaps even threatening petty lawsuits to demoralize the decent. In fact, Saul is the patron shitheel of the ACLU, since he didn't have to be a sneaky weasel with a briefcase, but could directly make "havoc of the church, entering every house and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison." If Gitmo were in existence back then, he would be fighting with all his strength for the release of the Christian killers.

Thus, Saul represents another kind of center, a perverse center, even the "center of perversity." He is the "center of (not at) the periphery," so to speak, at war with the true center. Paradoxically, he must obviously be quite full of himself, the opposite of the self-emptying, radiant center. But his fullness does not bring peace but persecution, just like anyone with too much self esteem and time on their hands.

As we have been reading lately, psychologists are finally catching up to the self-evident truth that "self esteem" is neutral at best, but usually destructive. Most of the problems in the world are caused by people with too much self esteem -- dictators, criminals, politicians, newspaper editors, etc. Because they are so full of themselves, there is no space for God, which requires self emptying of one's own (false) center. As Paul would later say -- I'm paraphrasing here from memory, "It is not I who live any longer, but Christ in me" -- i.e., the real center at his center, rather than the bogus center of the hypertrophied ego. One or the other must go.

Since the false center of the ego represents an ontological nothingness, its resultant darkness envies the light. This envy is the dreary joy of the joyless, who simply spend their petty lives grinding away at truth, beauty, and virtue, as do so many lie-roasted academia nuts. Nowadays they might call it "speaking truth to power" in order to elevate themselves in their own eyes. Or they might give each other academy awards, or Pulitzers, or Nobel prizes, or even Daytime Emmys.

These external supports are all necessary to prop up peripheral man and disable his consciousness of guilt. No doubt if Saul were alive today, he would have been given a Nobel Peace Prize for his important work in combating extreme Christianism. He would join the ranks of other recent winners -- men and institutions at war with the center such as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Mohamed El Baradei, the U.N., Al Gore, etc.

But then, on the "road to Damascus," as the cliche goes, Paul has a profound experience that unmasks and violently pulls him from the periphery to the center. In its own way, this event is as principial as its reverse, when the center emptied out to the periphery in Genesis I and on Holy Saturday. For quite suddenly, in an instance of true "quantum change," someone who had been at war with the center snaps like a rubber band into its opposite. If you can imagine the big bang as an infinite point radiating outward to the periphery, this would represent the opposite of that movement: a deusorienting implosion as dramatic as an underwater volcano in Upper Tonga.

The first and last step (and every step in between) on the spiritual path is "repentence," which actually comes from the Greek metanoia which is simply to "turn around." Instead of turning our back to the central sun, we look around and see it face-to-facelessness. Instead of running away from it, or struggling against it, we embrace it, like flowers that naturally orient themselves to the sun and open up or "surrender" in its presence.

Saul "opened up," and in so doing died to himself, in the same way you would die if you opened up your abdomen with a bowie knife. At once he was in the presence of the central light which "shone all around him" (for how could it not, if one's eyes are open?), and fell down like Saul t' the earth. Yes, in such circumstances we all fall what seems like a long distance. But in reality, it's just back to the ground, the same ground you were crawling on to begin with.

"Saul, why are you persecuting me? You're acting like a freaking ACLU goon. What's up with that?"

"Homina-homina-homina.... I was scared about the imminent Christo-fascist takeover, like I read about on dailykos... But w-what do you want with me?

"Before getting into that, why don't you just assimilate what's happened so far? Go have a little clubhouse meeting with yourself. Walking on water wasn't built in a day."

"B-b-but I'm blind. I can't see anything."

"Yes, I know that. This is not in the Book I've been sketching out, so you'll have to read between the lines. The point is not that you are blind. Rather, the point is that you can no longer "see" your previous world. It no longer exists because it never really existed. It is gone. Finished. No more. Ceased to be. You are now in the land of the Real, but you do not yet have the extrasensory organs to see it. You are like unto someone who is snowblind. The problem is not darkness, but too much light. Now get lost for a few days, unplug, chill, relux and call it a deity. And turn off your cell phone! If any Romans call, you're not home, got it?"

We are then told that Saul spent the subsequent three days without sight, without food, and without liquid -- i.e., closed to the horizontal -- and simply shut up in his existential darkness. One cannot help but compare this with Toots' "long weekend" in the drunk tank. While some blasphemers suggest that the visions were a result of delirium tremens, we know better.

This, of course, parallels the Jews' 40 years of wandering in the desert, Jesus' 40 days of fasting in the bewilderness, and ultimately the three days of the passion. In each case, "emptiness" at the periphery (i.e., "wilderness," "desert") is a prelude to "fullness" or "resurrection" at the center. Specifically, Saul's emptiness is filled with the Holy Spirit. He is charged with a vertical mission, for if Jesus took care of the R & D, then surely Paul was the marketing department. He is to spread the good news of the center to the periphery, to "bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel."

Paul has a new name and new vocation (which means "calling"). His earth name is gone, as is his sickular mission. Now he has a divine name and a divine mission. His sight is restored, but it's not like the old sight. Rather, he is granted the gift of 20/∞ cʘʘnvision, as "the scales fall from his eyes." Then he arises and stands in the divine ground as a truly Upright, Tripedal Man, an I-AMissary of the center instead of a bipedal beast of the periphery.

What About Bob?

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!